Uncategorized
kevin z | July 8, 2008Mr. Slybird has the latest and greatest Linneaus' Legacy carnival up at Biological Ramblings. It is an awesome blog carnival highlighting taxonomy, systematics, and biodiversity posts. They are looking for hosts for next month and beyond. Sign up and be a part of history in the making!
cmcclain | July 8, 2008Unfortunately not in the way I hoped. You may already know this but it is worth reiterating because it seems to keep coming back to the surface. McCain and Bush are recommending a plan for offshore drilling.
Once again this will not make a difference, especially where we are feeling it most--in our pocket books. First, the current supply of drilling ships will put a seven year hiatus on any offshore oil making it to the market. Second, our offshore oil reserves are insufficient to meet our consumption for more than a handful of years. These are not my opinions, not a liberal or…
cortex | July 8, 2008Some new evidence suggesting that children aren't such bundles of joy:
Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids.
Parents "definitely experienced more depression," says Robin Simon, a sociologist at Florida State University who has studied data on parenting.
"Part of our cultural beliefs is that we derive all this joy from kids," says Simon. "It's really hard for people who don't feel this to admit it." Social pressures to view only the positive aspects…
cortex | July 8, 2008Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories - Chesterton was also a consistent antisemitic, prone to tedious defenses of Catholic orthodoxy.
To be honest, though, my favorite thing about Chesterton are his aphorisms: only Wilde is more quotable. Gopnik has found some great ones ("The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, but to make settled things strange") but he left out a few of…
gregladen | July 8, 2008Consider this comment by Anders Norgaard of Spain, on the current Open Access discussion:
...For society and everyone who is not Nature (or other Toll-Access, high overhead journals) the framing [of the discussion as provided by Nature] does not make sense. The debate is part of a broader debate of the future of scientific publishing. And it is unreasonable to assume that a future of efficient digital publishing must be hobbled to serve to needs of businesses adapted to the past of high cost of paper distribution. Or that it must be measured by the same criteria of success (high profit from…
sb admin | July 8, 2008I'm repeating myself here, but it's for a good cause. At the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy at George Washington University School of Public Health, weâve launched a multi-part study to understand the current policies surrounding scientistsâ work at government agencies and to create recommendations for policies that support strong science and the appropriate role of scientists and researchers within our health and environment agencies.
Many talented government scientists leaving the federal agencies that protect our health and environment, and one of the ways to attract and…
pharyngula | July 8, 2008A major institution supporting the conflation of 'spirituality' and science, the Templeton Foundation, has lost its founder. Sir John Templeton is now cooling meat, his mind stilled, his 'spirit', whatever the heck that is, missing. This is a sad event, since from all I've heard from those who met him, he was a very nice fellow. It's just too bad that he threw so much money away into a fruitless and pointless endeavor that does nothing but prop up belief in unreality.
Now the question becomes one of the direction the Templeton Foundation will take in the future. I've also heard that his son…
kevin z | July 8, 2008
Darren Naish has some excellent posts up to commence Sea Monster Week at Tetrapod Zoology. Check out the tadpole-like Hook Island sea monster and the duck-billed elephant monster of Moore's Beach, Santa Cruz. Make sure you tune in all week!
kevin z | July 8, 2008Blue Economy has the latest edition of the Carnival of the Blue up! Take a look around the Blue Economy website. This is the first time I had seen it and there is a lot of quality posts their! I added them to the RSS feed and look forward to keeping up with them. (p.s.-beware of stealthy ninja hydromedusas...)
petnoyer | July 8, 2008Students from the New York City Home Educators Association (NYCHEA) took second place behind Blue Hills Technical High School in the 2008 NE Regional ROV Design Competition sponsored by the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) project. Winners advanced to the international competition on June 26 at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, where NYCHEA rallied to take first place!
This unique technology based competition challenged students to design and operate a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in a pool-based exercise that simulates a descent to 2500 m depth to survey and sample a…
gregladen | July 7, 2008I've noticed that the current discussion of Open Access has produced, on my site, a high ratio of comments to visitors. There are very few people actually reading these posts (relatively speaking) but lots of talking.
Passionate positions among few people.
I would like to take this moment to point out a few new items on the intertubes regarding this issue.
This item is to be found at the blog called The Scholarly Kitchen. This is a blog of the "Society for Scholarly Publishing" ... which is presumably a trade organization supporting the evil, pirate-like publishers. The piece makes a…
kevin z | July 7, 2008In the department of amazing photojournalism projects we have The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris.
"The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling.
In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. The first several days were spent in the village of Barrow, exploring ramshackle structures, buying gear, and otherwise helping the whaling crew to prepare for the hunt. We then traveled by snowmobile out onto the frozen Arctic Ocean, where we camped three miles from shore on thick pack ice, pitching…
mixingmemory | July 7, 2008In Chapter 3, we finally get to read all about the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent. I knew this was coming, of course, but for some reason, when I finally got to this chapter, I still felt surprised. I mean, at some point, you'd think he'd give up metaphors that even his own epigones can't find evidence for. But no, he clings to them even more desperately in this book, writing (I wish I could parody him this well, but he really wrote this):
It should be noted that these models [the "Strict Father" and "Nurturant Parent" models] are descriptive not prescriptive. They do occur in people's…
sb admin | July 7, 2008It might be hard to recall a time when we didnât know that exercise is good for your heart, and smoking is bad for it â but, back in 1948, researchers and clinicians knew little about the causes of cardiovascular disease. That year, the National Heart Institute (now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health) launched the ambitious Framingham Heart Study to âidentify the common factors or characteristics that contribute to CVD by following its development over a long period of time in a large group of participants who had not yet developed overt…
cortex | July 7, 2008Steve Shapin, a historian of science at Harvard, argues that the romantic notion of scientists lusting after truth and not worldly riches is a wee bit oversimplified:
IDEAS: Are we wrong to think of scientists as academics engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge?
SHAPIN: Well, I wouldn't deny that there are scientists, just like historians or sociologists, who are interested in following their curiosity for its own sake. What I do end up disputing, and I'm not alone in this, is this picture of who the scientist is, which emerges overwhelmingly from a rather idealized picture of academic…
cmcclain | July 7, 2008I unbeknown to me, St. Brendan apparently does not cover pirate attacks. No that protection is afforded by St. Albinus of Angers
Albinus had a big heart (as saints tend to have) and couldn't resist a call of distress. He used church money to free hostages from pirates. Obviously, pirate attacks aren't very common today, but in the 10th century, St. Albinus came in handy for the people of the walled town of Guerande. They had gotten word that pirates were on their way to attack the village and immediately started to pray to St. Albinus. The attackers were mysteriously deterred and the town…
cortex | July 7, 2008This is a heartwarming story about the power of kindness to change behavior and rewire instinct. Michael Vick, the imprisoned QB, trained his dogs to be cruel, nasty and brutish. (The dogs that didn't take to fighting were beaten, tortured and killed.) Most animal experts assumed that Vick's pit bulls would need to be euthanized, since they would never get over their aggression. But the experts were wrong:
The court gave Vick's dogs a second chance. U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ordered each dog to be evaluated individually, not judged by the stereotype of the breed. And he ordered Vick…
sciencetolife | July 7, 2008Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the major cause of death in infants between 1 month and 1 year of age in developed countries (1).
Researchers of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Monterotondo, Italy, have developed a mouse model of SIDS to study to role of serotonin signaling in the disease and hope to apply their findings to treating the same condition in humans.
Postmortem studies have shown alterations in serotonin neurons in the brainstem of SIDS infants. The researchers set out to determine how serotonin homeostasis may contribute to infant death in a mammalian…
gregladen | July 6, 2008
The Carnival of Cool Homeschoolers #3 is HERE at Homeschooled Twins.
Carnival of the Godless #95 is HERE at The Atheist Blogger.
Carnival of Space #61: Tunguska Edition is HERE at the bat page or something...
Carnival of the Liberals, 68th Edition is HERE at Atheist Revolution.
Bookworms Carnival - Edition #13 (Relationships) is HERE at caribousmom.
The 225th edition of the Carnival Of Cats is HERE at House Panthers.
Carnival of Education (178th Edition) is HERE at An (aspiring) Educator's Blog.
The Carnival of Homeschooling - Celebrating July 4th is HERE at about.com
And please…